 Hello there and welcome to another episode of the hyperbolic wine chamber where I train my ability to complain I am Tom Oliver and today we are drinking Citizen cider unified press traditional semi-sweet apple cider This is made locally in Vermont, which is pretty close to where I am here in Massachusetts Citizen cider calm It's pretty good. I've had a few cans of it so far. I'm a big fan of hard cider in general The reason I bought this actually wasn't because I was in the mood for cider or anything It was because the graphic design on the can is really nice really good type setting Yeah, that's that's what happens when you go to school for graphic design kids That's where your purchase influences come from good typography gets you a purchase from me. So Yeah Not too sweet got just enough tart to it to be pleasant Good good good dude and good interaction with the palate. I like it like it a lot hmm Citizen cider calm If you would like to donate to the wine fund and suggest a wine to drink on the show As well as a topic to bitch about on the wine chamber There's a link in the description to my paypal I'll also link to my coffee, which is a new thing I have now So you want to instead of buy me a coffee buy me a drink and do that as well They both have a note feature so you can drop in what I should look for and what I should talk about now Before we go any further I wanted to make a quick mention because someone a couple months ago sent me a wine suggestion and a topic suggestion And I'm not doing them right now and the reason for that is uh, I don't know if the the the payment got declined or was Canceled or something. It's weird. So I'm not gonna use any names But the guy said to get some passion pump and if not just get some box wine and wanted to complain about Windows updates Which actually I could say a lot about it because I had a bunch of problems Windows updates But it's the status is money received Canceled so I don't know if if it never went through the payment never went through or like PayPal did something Or it's just like you've taken like three months to get to my wine chamber topic I'm taking my money back totally understandable, but just wanted to throw that out there You know who you are if you're listening to this there was a weird issue with that and that's why I haven't gotten the passion Pop also the joke of the show is that it's called the wine chamber and I drink everything but wine So I'm more than willing to sell myself out and kill the joke entirely for money But I'm just letting you know that that's kind of the gist of the show Is that it's a it's a play on words with wine because I'm whining while drinking not wine That that there you go. I've explained the joke. It's no longer a joke So I guess I can do whatever I want now, but today on the wine chamber We're drinking citizen cider and we're talking about I really didn't have a good way of phrasing this like snappy Maybe I've come up with something better by the time this goes up and I have a title for this episode But for now it's going to be diametrically opposed advice That is convincing on both sides So I don't know a snap you're ready to put that yet I'm gonna I'm gonna workshop it a bit between now and when this gets posted, but the idea basically is that when we're growing up we learn things and Usually as we grow up it kind of Internalize the building blocks of like how to actually function in society and be a semi-competent human being and kind of build the baseline skills You need to be actually functional There's usually a pretty straightforward path on how to do that You know and if someone tries to deviate you from the path Once you have some general context, it's pretty self-evident that deviating from the path is a bad idea Let's say you're a little kid and your parents tell you don't touch the stove. It'll burn you I'm not gonna touch the stove If someone then comes along it says hey touch the stove it builds character Not a very convincing argument. You really don't want to scald your hands. You're gonna be like no I'm good on that dude not gonna touch the stove And if you do you're gonna learn pretty quickly that advice kind of sucked Like the character doesn't help your hand heal over the next like two or three weeks Simple example, but you get the general idea. There's like a very linear sort of singular progression to Building the basic building blocks you need in order to be a functional human being but at some point around adolescence Things start to get kind of convoluted Multiple paths open up you can spec into different options as you were if you want to get some leap gamer terms in here Right, you can go in different directions and that's where things start to get a little bit murky You get to specialize, you know your hobbies your education your your dreams and ambitions in life. There's tons of different options I think it gets even worse though when you're done with education because when you're when you're educating yourself And you're going through the high school system the college system the trades school anything like that There is an underlying structure, right? That's why you're paying money you're putting the time and that's why the accreditation You earn has merit because there is some sort of underlying structure that you're working within and The people outside judging you based on your your acquisition of your diploma your scale or whatever They know that you were able to function within the boundaries of those constraints and perform accordingly That's kind of where the value of a degree or whatever comes from but when you try and decide your life after that You try and make more abstract decisions lots of people offer tons of conflicting advice that all seem Basically as good and as relevant as the next one and they all make compelling arguments And now it's up to you someone who has been on a single trajectory For the most part a very structured way of learning a very structured way of progressing your life and acquiring new skills to discern with no kind of a Guidance whatsoever on how the best way is to operate your life and Perhaps this is just me as someone who is like cursed with analysis paralysis constantly overthinking everything but The more I try and learn about how I should function as a human being and how I want to function as a human being the skills I want to acquire the ways. I want to live my life the values. I want to uphold There are tons of conflicting information out there and none of them seem less compelling than the next They all make good cases and it's up to me to try and figure out Which way I want to go and the only way to really kind of come to a proper conclusion It seems is trial and error and that's a pain in the ass Let me give you an example. This is probably the most relevant example to me personally in my life That continually comes up in some way or another because it's a broad subject that can be attacked from different angles But it really boils down to the same thing ambition versus complacency And that sounds much more derogatory really when I say it that way than what I mean To kind of delve into it a bit more. I am the kind of person that reads self-help books I just I know it's kind of sad But that's just kind of where I am in my life And I like I like reading books and like listening to audiobooks that stuff mostly because I have an audible account And I can't stand listening to fiction in audio books, but also because there's a lot of Interesting people I usually usually what happens is I'll find someone on YouTube just kind of browsing YouTube And I get a suggestion I like find a person who seems really interesting as a speaker like Gary Vaynerchuk is a good example And so I read his book and I bought his book So that's kind of how I find a lot of these audio books that I end up purchasing because I have like these tokens every month I'm like what the fuck else am I gonna do with it? I'm not gonna listen to Lord of the Rings and have some weird British guy try and voice You know every character, but um I digress these self-help books kind of there. There's two different schools There's kind of like the Western business Self-help of like pulling you up yourself up by your bootstraps and like attacking everything head-on create big goals Always be striving to grow more and more and more be the biggest best you can be Figure out what your goal is and then make it a hundred times bigger and go for that There's that one aspect of like constant self-improvement constant growth and constant just like Expanding of your abilities and never being satisfied with where you are and then on the other hand you have the minimalist kind of Zen I don't want to say Eastern but like kind of like the Buddhist kind of more like calm Zen mentality of just like you know get your shit sorted Understand that nothing is as important as it's all being told to you to be and kind of try and find some inner Tranquility and balance carve out a small little niche for yourself master that and Then learn to be complacent and maybe I'm in place right but satisfied great. It's really Being hungry for more versus being grateful for what you already have and both sides of this equation make really Good arguments right because on the one hand this kind of like growth mentality is Avoiding stagnation. It's about not letting any of your potential go to waste It's realizing that the human potential in everybody is massive and you just have to learn to tap into it and be comfortable Going to places you haven't been before being vulnerable and weak and and unskilled and Powering through that to reach new heights and I guess as someone who's Entrepreneurially minded and why I'm doing all the YouTube stuff Like I want to tap into that more because I feel like that's definitely something that's holding me back from getting to a Digibroad level of success is like really Focusing like picking one skill and hammering away at that hard core over and over and over again and not accepting anything Less than the best that I can do and beyond that and really planning Huge and going far beyond anything. I've never attempted to do before and really push hard on that But on the other hand, you know the the the the gratitude mentality would say that that Mentality is dangerous because you're never satisfied Even when you accomplish your goals It's short-lived and you're just going to keep chasing the next high for the rest of your life And you'll be chasing these empty Accomplishments where if you come at it from an angle of gratitude you can be thankful for what you have and When you grow it's always on top of a stable base like the growth Isn't to give your life meaning. It's just something on top of meaning. You've already derived from something internal But the downside to that is that you're limiting your potential because you're not working as hard You might have more inner peace. You might have more like mental tranquility But you're inevitably not going to push yourself as hard or go as far as you would if you were hungry so it's this kind of mentality I've always struggled with because Because I've been raised in like a Western culture, you know in America The first method of like constant growth and the hunger mentality dominates our culture It's everything in America is bigger better faster stronger all that shit So that's the kind of mentality that I've always adopted and I definitely feel like because of my like mental deficiencies You know my clinical depression and things like that It makes it very difficult to achieve that because you need to be confident in yourself You need to be able to take hits and keep going and because I'm just very mentally unstable Being able to power through things like that is very difficult and that leads to a lot of my problems that I've had in the last couple Years trying to make it as a content creator So the allure of trying to like go inward and find this gratitude and this inner peace of this other sort of mentality is Very appealing, but I just feel that it would it would be counterintuitive to what I want to achieve long term I want to be big and this is the thing like even my idea of being big is like I'd like 100,000 subscribers or something like that An audience big enough to sustain me financially so I can do what I want to do But the the growth minded mentality would say that that's thinking too small I need to be like the biggest youtuber of all time. I've got to make millions of dollars I got to grow bigger bigger bigger and like I got to take my 100,000 no no times about 100 you need 10 million 100 million like that's what you need to shoot for And it's just this like I don't want to say greed But you're tap dancing on the line between ambition and greed by going for this Hardcore and it really needs you to have an ego and I definitely don't have one So this is just one example But there's tons of other examples in life of like arguments being made That both seem equally cogent and it really comes down to personal preference And the problem is when you're somebody who's looking for answers Which is how you're going to run into all these kind of things in the first place you Are looking for answers So when you're presented with multiple choices, you're not really in the mindset of like trying to sift through all these things You're looking for someone to tell you what you need to do because the whole problem is you don't know what to do So when you're presented with multiple options that seem good you're kind of Just giving yourself a new set of problems as opposed to finding the solution you were looking for So this is something that's always bothered me because I have a pension already to be analysis Paralysis of just like being overloaded by choice, and they're not making any choice I'm very susceptible to falling into this trap of being like this is a good idea But this is a good idea, but this is a good idea too So which idea do I want to do and it seems like the only thing I can do Is just play musical chairs with them essentially and keep trying one out and seeing if it works for me or not But even then like I'm always trying to look for the objective truth And it's arguable that there is no objective truth, but I think in the confines of our reality I think there are definitely choices that have more merit than others like even if I said, you know what? I'm just going to be uh Gratitude minded like in the back of my head. I'm always going to be like, but you could be doing better You could be doing more you could be bigger and vice versa the other way Like if I'm constantly hungry and keep climbing the ladder I'm just like you could just calm down, you know, you could take a moment and just kind of like Clear your head a little bit and not be so voracious all the time like just chill So I don't know that's that's really all I wanted to say is a short episode But that's what I'm bitching about is that I just I wish things were simpler. I wish Maybe you that if things can't be simpler. I wish we were given more tools Growing up to face things like this They're because in our in our education system It feels like to be at least in my experience is that it's very much One answer, you know, they give you the answer they prep you for that answer And there's there's a linear progression in learning things and you know, especially in school There's never multiple ways of doing things. It's always like this is the one way regurgitate what we've told you You can't really come to differing conclusions for the most part and college sometimes you can But even then it depends on who's teaching the the material So In light of not being able to simplify a complicated world. I wish we were better prepared to make complicated choices At least me So that's all I got for this episode of the hyperbolic wine chamber It's good to be back Check the links below if you want to donate to the wine fund If you want to support me and all my other content long term You go to patreon.com slash save me a dollar a month gets you a bunch of extra stuff Including cool art things and you can rant at me about how dumb I am or whatever So until next time tom Oliver, this has been the hyperbolic wine chamber Have a good one